The present invention relates to an optical disc apparatus and a method for controlling an overwrite power which can be suitably applied to the optical disc apparatus capable of performing an overwrite operation, for example, on a re-writable type optical disc.
A conventional optical disc apparatus has a problem that when performing an overwrite operation on a previously recorded recording area, a recording quality at the time of currently performing recording is largely different depending on a previously recorded recording state.
In the case where a recording power at the time of being previously recorded is particularly large, when performing an overwrite operation using the recording power that is adjusted by an optimum power control (OPC), possibility of a recording error such as Jitter error (PI error) increases to incur deterioration of recording quality in many cases. A so called retry process or alternation process is forced to be performed and as a result, a transfer rate of data tends to be undesirably lowered.
To solve the above-described problem, for example, according to Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2005-196890, an information recording device is provided with a recording means for recording information on a recording area in the information recording medium by irradiation with laser light, a reference output value holding means for holding the reference output value of the laser light for recording the information, an inference means for inferring the output value of the laser light in the past irradiation in the already recorded area in which the information is already recorded, and a control means for controlling the recording means to perform irradiation on the already recorded area with the laser light having an output value larger than the reference output value, when the inferred output value is larger than the reference output value.